This project needs to move forward, so a meeting will be held this Monday (
10th May ) at 2000 UTC on #gentoo-wiki channel @Freenode, in order to elect a
new leader and get this project up and running asap

This project needs to move forward, so a meeting will be held this Monday (
10th May ) at 2000 UTC on #gentoo-wiki channel @Freenode, in order to elect a
new leader and get this project up and running asap

I've felt that gentoo should have a good official wiki for a long time and think this is great news! I maintain a few medium sized wikis (about 200 - 400 unique visitors per day to each one respectively) for my business so if whomever is taking over needs some help feel free to PM me and I might know something of use.

Regarding the captchas and registration I personally require only captchas (I use recaptcha) for unregistered users on mine. I don't get a lot of user participation though - maybe one edit per week on average. I also make use of certain restrictions and configuration options which makes it impossible for brand new users to do certain things (they need so many edits). There is hardly any spam using this configuration although I do get some, on average maybe one a month (And surprisingly even with recaptcha it is usually unregistered users). I also made sure to protect the high importance pages such as the main one - this is critical since it is the first thing the spammers will try to hit! Next they'll usually try to hit that pages talk page.

If you can get 3-5 users who will pledge to check -- once a day -- each edit for that particular day for spam or vandalism (and who also know how to edit appropriately) you could probably get by without requiring both registration and captcha. (I'll gladly volunteer to be one of those users for this once I register over there, if needed) You might even get by without requiring either although there is a risk of mass spamming (like 10,000 pages in one day) which requires an administrator to do some work to fix.

I notice there are two wikis out there who already seem to exist with some old information. It might be a good idea to ask those owners if they would be willing to participate provided you can trust them (I notice banners which indicates a commercial interest which probably would not be welcomed?). If you can it might be an idea to populate some articles using those wikis and then edit them respectively over time to bring them up to date. PErhaps include a header on each page scraped by default which warns the user that the information is out of date. Once the page has been edited, updated, and verified reasonably up to date people can take that header (template) off that particular page. I'm unsure of any licensing issues involved in this however. I was under the impression that once Gentoo did have an official wiki but some sort of disaster happened? I don't know for sure as it was presumably before my time, it's just something I once heard. I always assumed that was where these other unofficial Gentoo wikis got their initial content?

I apologize for the length of this - my intent is only to help, if possible.

added: Just a tip for anyone wanting to keep track of things (especially whoever is in charge!). There usually are RSS feeds set up by default. If you put this in your rss reader this will help you keep an eye on things: http://gentoowiki.a3li.li/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom It will generate some more load on the server however by doing this. It's a great way to monitor things. I always keep an eye on this for mine to watch for vandalism or spammers.

gentoo-wiki.com and gentoo proper hopefully could work together. I recall a few years ago gentoo-wiki had a database failure and since then the gentoo-wiki website has really never been the same. Perhaps the gentoo-wiki admins on freenode might be willing to contribute the original site archives to the gentoo foundation._________________Compiling Gentoo since version 1.4
Thousands of Gentoo Installs Completed
Emerged on every continent but Antarctica
Compile long and Prosper!

gentoo-wiki.com and gentoo proper hopefully could work together. I recall a few years ago gentoo-wiki had a database failure and since then the gentoo-wiki website has really never been the same. Perhaps the gentoo-wiki admins on freenode might be willing to contribute the original site archives to the gentoo foundation.

What hasn't been the same about it?

Since the database loss the community wiki put in place new back up procedures to ensure such an incident doesn't happen again (for starters, anyone can download a full backup of the wiki minus the user data) and practically all of the commonly used articles have been restored (or completely rewritten). I believe the DB loss was a "blessing in disguise" as it allowed the wiki to clean up a lot of legacy issues (page naming conventions, a lot of duplicate / crud articles). I believe the wiki is in a better state now than it was before the database loss.

There have been occaisional hiccups in availability of the servers for the community wiki, but these get sorted pretty quickly and the servers have only got more stable over time. Some of these issues might not happen if a different hosting provider was used, but moving an entire site is not a simple process and donated hosting often comes with restrictions and other issues.

If you know of any articles which haven't been restored yet, please link to them - there are editors who will help to restore these articles even if you don't have the time / knowledge to do so.

As a side note, #gentoo-wiki on Freenode is now owned by the official wiki project. The official channel for the community wiki is on EFNet (simply because that's where the site owner hangs out - nothing really goes on in there anyway as all wiki related topics can be communicated easily using the wiki's talk pages).

The archive at gentoo-wiki.info was created by another user and that site isn't anything to do with either wiki (other than they crawled googles cache to create an archive of the community wiki before the database loss).

Yeah, the project started a while ago, but I don't even know if it's still active or not ?

Given that they have a public IRC channel, with multiple active developers and a few users present when I checked, and a public test server up and running, I think it safe to consider the project to be active, if not exactly heavily publicized.